As Mandela's childhood home in Qunu prepares for his funeral on Sunday, the Guardian made the journey from Johannesburg to the tiny Eastern Cape village in an attempt to understand Mandela's legacy, starting in Alexandra.

Alexandra

While many of the stops on Nelson Mandela's long walk have been turned into tourist attractions, the broken-down yard in Hofmeyer Street looks much the same as it must have done when the man who would become South Africa's first democratically elected president arrived in Johannesburg in the 1940s.

An olive tree next to the rusting outhouse and a blue plaque on a broken brick wall cannot disguise the fact that the township of Alexandra, where Mandela first lived on moving to the city, has benefited little from nearly 20 years of democratic rule.

Alex, as it is known, with its tightly packed shacks, is a noisy place. A few hours after church services ended on the day of prayer in Mandela's honour on Sunday, afternoon drinkers stumbled under the disused arch of the Alexandra Centre of Memory – a moribund project meant to bring visitors and money to the neighbourhood.

Kgagki Maloke was not in mourning. "Everybody dies," said the owner of the Jazz pub, a few doors down from Mandela's former home. "My father is 98 years old and I respect him more."

Maloke grew up hearing tales of his father's classmate Oliver Tambo, the man who led the ANC but died of a stroke on the brink of freedom in 1993. "He would sit in the back of class reading comics and would still be first every time."

Bald and round with a growl of a voice, Maloke echoes the disenchantment of many South Africans who feel that Mandela delivered democracy without economic liberation.

"We thought after independence we would get our land back," he said. He is still waiting for the right to own the club he has run for decades. The 58-year-old fought a long battle to save his eldest son from drug addiction and says Alex is awash with cheap narcotics that blend rat poison, heroin and HIV/Aids medicines.

"I've lived here my whole life and what I see is more poverty than before. These people you talk to love him and will tell you he's an icon. They don't know, to them he's just a celebrity."

Bloemfontein

If Alex offers a disturbing look at urban decay in post-apartheid South Africa, the next stop on the road to Qunu – the farms around Bloemfontein, 350 miles to the southwest, can make the visitor feel they have stepped into the pages of a history book. Grand white gates lead to gabled farmhouses that sit atop hillocks overlooking ploughed fields.

The past is overwhelmingly present at Onze Rust, a farm that has been in the Steyn family for five generations. Colin Steyn keeps a private museum to the Boer war in the basement of his stone farmhouse. Ornately carved late 19th-century rifles line the walls, with a bloodstained stretcher from the battle of Ladysmith and a sepia photograph of his great-grandfather, who was president of the former Orange Free State.

Colin Steyn in Bloemfontein: 'The first 10 years the white community was very cross, now it's the blacks, but there had to be give and take.' Photograph: Hannah McNeish for the Guardian

A red-faced bear of a man, Steyn marked the centenary of the war in 2002 by reconstructing the key battles but, unlike some of his fellow military enthusiasts, he does not dream of restoring the old order. "They talk of getting the country back, how ridiculous," he said. "You don't want a war, I tell them. All you would inherit would be ashes and graves."

A state prosecutor, he is, perhaps unexpectedly, a fan of the late liberation leader. He describes his only meeting with the former president as being "struck by a comet". He shook the then-president's hand at a reception and stood face to face with him. Still starstruck, he admits: "I couldn't breathe."

On hearing of his death, Steyn thought of the great man's handshake. "It was so soft, unlike the Afrikaners who like to see if they can break a bone in the other man's hand."

While a small minority of white South Africans have expressed fears of violence after Mandela's death, Steyn sees a country with strong institutional foundations. He even has kind words for Jacob Zuma, whom he says has a good sense of humour. He liked it when Zuma recently exhorted his compatriots not to "think like Africans". "The black man in South Africa has a different outlook than the rest of Africa," he said.

Mandela had no choice other than to compromise in 1993 when he was negotiating with the apartheid government, Steyn believes, so as to keep the country functioning economically to "lift up his people".

"The first 10 years (after the end of apartheid) the white community was very cross, now it's the blacks, but there had to be give and take. It's a good indication of the way the negotiation went."

Dimbaza

Five hours' drive south, across the provincial border from the Free State into the Eastern Cape, lies a reminder of the worst excesses of apartheid. Dimbaza township was created in 1967 as a dumping ground for "surplus" blacks who were deemed economically unproductive by the regime.

Hundreds of families were plucked from their homes and deposited in rows of wooden huts without running water or electricity. Because of its isolation, the residents of Dimbaza were later joined by released political prisoners from Robben Island, where Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment.

Among the ex-Robben Island arrivals at Dimbaza was Moses Twebe, who alongside Mandela, was a founding member of the African National Congress's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). The centrepiece of Dimbaza became a graveyard where malnourished children, made ill by sparse government rations, were buried.

Twebe died earlier this year and his son Zolile, who still lives in the deprived township, remembers arriving there with his newly released father in the late 1960s. "It was just a concentration camp," he said. Following in his father's radical footsteps, Zolile joined the ANC and fought in the proxy war across the border in Angola. Now with his father gone, the gaunt 58-year-old is responsible for nearly a dozen relatives and survives on a modest pension. He admitted there has been little progress for people living in places like Dimbaza.

"That's why Mandela said it was a long walk to freedom," he said. "We can't say there's no progress. We took over a country that was vandalised by the apartheid regime and it will take time, maybe even 100 years."

But he admitted his father had died a disillusioned man. And Zolile worries that in trying so hard to remember Mandela, people were forgetting others who struggled, such as Steve Biko, the murdered black consciousness leader.

Qunu

The remembrance will reach its crescendo 200 miles from Dimbaza across what was known as the Transkei when Mandela was still a precociously smart Xhosa boy.

Local building contractor Qutu Fonabo, whose crew is helping to erect the giant marquee over Mandela's final resting place, cannot understand what more people could have expected from him.

"I see the changes," he said, pointing out that under apartheid he would have needed a permit to travel even half an hour away to the nearest big town, Mthatha. "Now you go everywhere you want and no one asks you why or where."

The 40-year-old hopes the grand occasion of the funeral might prompt his own children to pay attention to the past. "The children under 20 know nothing about the past. You try to tell them about apartheid and they're laughing. They don't care."